News – August 2018

Several new publications are due for release in the coming months. Firstly, coming out on 12th October is a translation of Colette Soler’s Lacan Reading Joyce, courtesy of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research Library and publishers Routledge. It introduces Soler’s influential reading of Lacan’s approach to the Irish novelist, through the latter’s famous Seminar The Sinthome from 1975-76, and its origins in Lacan’s earlier work in such as ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious’ from 1956. Soler herself began practicing and teaching psychoanalysis in the year of Lacan’s seminar on Joyce after having been in analysis with Lacan, and she continues to do so as part of the organisation she founded, the School of the Forums of the Lacanian Field.

Jacob Johanssen’s Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Datais due to be published by Routledge on 19th October. It offers a comprehensive account of the contemporary media environment and an introduction to the psychoanalytic affect theories of Freud and Didier Anzieu (son of Lacan’s patient Aimée, the subject of his doctoral disseratation). Lacan is also discussed in one chapter. A preview of the contents is available on the Routledge site, and it is also available to buy from Amazon.

On 25th October, Antoine Mooij’s Lacan and Cassirer will be released by Brill. Subtitled ‘An Essay on Symbolisation’ it presents Lacan alongside the neo-Kantian philosopher by way of the correspondence between their shared idea that access to reality is mediated through images and signifiers. Mooij argues for the complementarity of their approaches on the grounds that both thinkers present human subjects as an “animal symbolicum”, demonstrated with examples from the realms of perception, language, politics and ethics among others. Mooij is Professor Emeritus of Law and Psychiatry, Utrecht University whose previous publications on Lacanian psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and hermeneutical psychiatry include Desire, Responsibility. A Study in Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis and Law(2010) and Psychiatry as a Human Science. Phenomenological, Hermeneutical and Lacanian Perspectives(2012).

At the end of October, After Lacan: Literature, Theory and Psychoanalysis in the 21st Century by Ankhi Mukherjee will be released by Cambridge University Press. Mukherjee attempts an examination of the past, present, and futures of psychoanalysis through an interdisciplinary approach across clinical, sociological, philosophical, and literary fields. Racism, To demonstrate this she draws on a range of examples including Islam, the Communist Party, poetry, disability identity and queer theory.

Looking further ahead into November, the paperback edition of Paul Allen Miller’s Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, which first appeared back in 2007, will be published by Ohio State University Press. As a classicist, but one embedded in French poststructuralist thought, Allen makes the case for the greater debt Lacan and others in this tradition owe to Plato. He attempts to bridge the gap between analytic philosophy’s limited confinement to epistemology, speech act theory, and the philosophy of science on one hand, and on the other the lack of interest among Anglo-American scholars in Lacan’s work which has hitherto obscured this.

Newly-announced for released in 2019 is Lacanian analyst Bogdan Wolf’s latest book, Between Desire and Anxiety: What Lacan Says in Seminar X, which will be released by Routledge in February next year. It is a detailed analysis of Lacan’s pivotal Seminar on anxiety from 1962-1963, tracing the latter’s treatment of the topic from the distinction between inhibition, embarrassment, and turmoil at the beginning, to the relation between anxiety, desire, and the body at the end.

The English translation of Sibylle Lacan’s memoir about her father, A Father: Puzzle will be published by MIT in June 2019, translated by Adrian Nathan West. Sibylle Lacan was the second daughter of Jacques Lacan and Marie-Louise Blondin, who tragically committed suicide in November 2013. In excerpts from the book, she describes her aim in writing it as “to let rise to the surface of my memory everything important—be it deeply tragic or deeply comic—that occurred between my father and me”. Less about Lacan-the-man, and even less about psychoanalysis, it is nonetheless a deeply personal reflection on Lacan-the-father, and all the more of interest from that unique perspective.

Turning to events, The Freud Museum will be broadcasting a live video stream of its upcoming conference on psychosis on 29 September. The livestream will be accessible in exchange for a donation to the Psychosis Therapy Project – see here for details.

In New York, Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association carries details of its current events for the coming month, which can be previewed on its homepage, with the full schedule here. The programme for the 2018-2019 academic year is the third part of its series titled ‘The Subject and the Social Link’. The Association has also recently launched its bookstore with several titles now available.

Registration is open for the Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups 2018 Conference, which will be held in Boston, MA, Fri 5th-Sunday 7th October. The title is ‘Psychoanalysis: Science and Truth’ and keynote speakers will be Tom Svolos and Renata Salecl.

The London Society of the NLS is putting on an Open Day on 29th September to introduce the theme for the next NLS Congress – Urgent! – and to present the Society’s programme for the coming academic year. The event is free but attendees are asked to register in advance.

The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London will also begin its Public Seminar series for the autumn term on 29th September. The venue has moved down the road from Birkbeck College to University College London. The full programme up to 15th December can be found here. A Short Course on Supervision will also be offered by the Centre over the autumn, beginning on 6th October. Details here.

Lastly, for French speakers, the École de la Cause freudienne has announced its 48th Study Days for 17th and 18th November in Paris. The topic this time is on the marriage equality debate, still an issue in France where psychoanalysts are often turned to for comment. The event will explore sexuality and marriage in the psychoanalytic experience, a subject all the more relevant in light of the recent publication of Lacan’s Seminar XIX, …or Worse, which is now available in English translation.

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There may be little in the way of comments under your postings, but I just want to express my gratitude for all the content of this site. The clear and engaging presentation is a feature, particularly when compared to other psychoanalytic pages.

LacanOnline.com is a site for exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, 1901 - 1981.
Trained as a psychiatrist, he abandoned the profession in favour of psychoanalysis in the early thirties. After publishing his paper on the Mirror Stage in 1949, for which he is probably best known to the general public, in the early fifties Lacan embarked on a project he called the 'Return to Freud'.

Lacan began holding yearly seminars, starting in 1952, re-examining Freud's work. At the time, the theory and technique of psychoanalysis was facing a complete overhaul at the hands of post-Freudian psychoanalysts, many of whom had emigrated to the United States after the war. Lacan railed against their teaching of Freud, seeing it as an oversimplification of his work and a corruption of psychoanalytic technique reducing it to the status of life management. Through his seminars he offered another interpretation of Freud's work and psychoanalytic theory. Inventive, radical and adventurous, many still believe Lacan's to be a creative mis-reading of Freud.

However Lacan's seminars grew in popularity and as his teaching developed from a reading of Freud's text to an elaboration of his own concepts his teaching became more influential. Lacan continued to give yearly seminars until the year before his death in 1981. By that time, he had become a major intellectual figure in public life and had both created and disbanded his own school, separating his members both from the established psychoanalytic institutions and from each other.

Today, Lacanian theory is advanced by a number of disparate groupings of his followers and the technique of psychoanalysis he developed is practiced clinically by Lacanian analysts around the world.